Private Clouds Get Public Boost From Red Hat

The OpenStack project got a boost today when Red Hat released a preview version of its own version of the open source cloud software. The preview edition isn’t meant to be run in production, but will give cloud hackers a chance to tinker with the software and provide feedback ahead of Red Hat’s official release, expected next year.

OpenStack, which we’ve covered extensively, is an operating system for cloud data centers. It’s used by Amazon competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace, which recently announced that all its data centers now run OpenStack, and HP’s cloud service. But it can also be used by big companies that want to keep control of their data by running what’s called a private cloud.

Although it’s not as mature as Amazon’s dominant cloud platform, OpenStack backers hope that by opening up their underlying software they can give their platform an edge, much the same way that Linux eventually outmaneuvered Unix in the server market.

Red Hat passed the $1 billion dollars in revenue milestone earlier this year on the strength of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its line of JBOSS middleware products, but if the enterprise market really moves to the cloud, Red Hat wants to be the company that powers those data centers.

To that end, Red Hat has been steadily rolling out cloud products, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms (a cloud management tool that supports OpenStack), Red Hat Storage (based on technology Red Hat acquired from Gluster last year) and OpenShift (an open source platform-as-a-service that competes with VMware’s CloudFoundry). OpenStack is the cherry on top that will enable the company to offer a near-full software stack to a cloud data center.

Prior to joining the OpenStack project Red Hat partnered with Eucalyptus, a company that offers a competing open source cloud system. Other competing platforms include Cloud Stack, backed by Citrix, and Smart OS, backed by Joyent.